Eee PC - practical work experience
Ralf Haller
March 10th, 2008
As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had bought for myself an Eee PC (standard Linux, 4G model). Having used it now for a few weeks on some one-day trips to replace my laptop I think I can give a reasonable judgment.
Size and weight are its greatest plus. I also did not have any issues with the battery runtime. For the day trips I did with it, the battery lasted long enough to work at the airport, in trains or during a flight. At the beginning I had to get used to the keyboard, which to my taste was a bit hard, and also the selection button in front of the mouse pad needed a hard thumb. After a while this was OK for me, though. Still, writing a text had me make many more typos than I usually do, slowing me down quite a bit. Equally, the small display got too small for my eyes.
All the negatives made me decide to hand over the Asus Eee PC to my kids. They adopted it eagerly and I really had to make sure that they did let go of it after 2 hours. The biggest hit for them right now is a drawing program which they use to make portraits of all kinds. Even my 4 1/2 year old is into it and can work with the Eee without a problem. I was amazed to see that. Other programs I have not seen them using yet though. The games seem to be either too simple and boring or too advanced. The biggest drawback I see though that with Linux running on it they cannot easily install any other programs. So Windows OS would be important for them, and I might install it. Then trying to access online portals for games did not work well either, as the web browser had a real problem with the small resolution and it became a pain in the neck to do anything useful. Not what you want when you do games. So in short, while the Asus Eee is a great little device and on the right path, quite some improvements are needed to make it more than an early adopter toy. Clearly for business users it is not a machine you will want, at least not at this stage. Maybe some time down the road this will change and, as the past has shown and Moore’s Law lets us still expect, the future will be smaller and cheaper and at some point in time a Sony or Toshiba ~1kg (with battery) laptop might not cost 4,000 USD but just 400 USD. Looking forward to those true mobile times.
